What a joy it is crafting prayer wheels 😊
As time goes by (some say faster and faster) I get to think a lot about "worth"… about my "worth" in this world…
When I was young, I was brought up to live and "see" the world as a community. Sharing everything we had down to our cloths. The most important rule we were taught was that work has the highest of values. There is nothing more important than hard work… they never taught us about money or how the economics of this world works…. I saw my first 100 shekel bill when I was maybe 10… we had no physical money, we were a social communist community (called Kibbutz for those of you who wish to explore it further) and we lived by the rule of "give all you can, get what you need". This worked great for about 80 years…
The point I am trying to convey is that in my mind, I did not have the correct "hard disk" to live comfortably in the "real" world that revolves around money… I had a different hard disk and for some time, while I was living in the real world my attitude did not fit the situation… long story short, I became a homeless and had nothing to eat… that is what happens when you do not teach a child the correct way to handle money, or even understand monetary views…
I grew up, understood the function of money and started going up the corporate ladder so to speak, but the most important lesson I got to learn about money was very recently.
By the time I was around the age of 29 or 30 I read somewhere that money is a form of evaluation that society has agreed upon where you give your talent and get paid by how much "value" I feel about your job… my car breaks down, I go to a mechanic… he sacrificed time to learn about cars, I did not… now, he "knows" what to do while I do not… he then fixes my car. I appreciate this a lot!!! So, I show him my appreciation by giving him the amount of appreciation we agreed upon. That is how money actually works… I can hug him too as appreciation, but he might not accept that as a form of payment 😊
When I realized that I finally understood why some people get a lot of money and why some do not…. This all made perfect sense.
As time went by I climbed up the ladder, sacrificed more and more of my time, my abilities, my sanity, my health…. But I got paid more and more…
At some point I became a farmer. I thought: "what is the best form of appreciation? I will grow food for people! Then, the money I make comes from the highest form of appreciation! I grow food for them, they pay me money as a form of their appreciation!" it all seemed perfect.
After a few years I realized that mono-culture farming (which I was a part of by managing the community's farm) is killing this earth, destroying the humans that live on it and all of nature. This method of farming is a big lie and we are all the victims of it. I decided to let that go and quit my job. After 18 years of climbing the ladder to success, I was out.
Now, a prayer wheel maker, I feel that I have finally found my place in the "monetary" world of money and value. I finally use my talent, my time and effort to create something that has value in the eyes of some and they wish to pay me their appreciation by giving me money… now this all makes sense and I can live my life by doing something beneficial to this world and beyond…
I was extremely fortunate to meet H.E. Garchen Rinpoche in this life back in November of 2008 and since then my life has never been the same.
Thank you all for your support in our prayer wheel project, it is making this world (and many more worlds) a better place to live in, and by doing that, we get to buy food and shelter in this one 😊
